Tag Archives: Microsoft Details Pinning Sites On Windows 8

The main highlighting feature of Windows 8 has been the Metro Interface.The Metro Interface consists of Live Tiles which shows us the new and updated content.

In a recent post on the Internet Explorer blog Microsoft described in detail about IE10’s pinned sites and their availability on the Windows 8 Start screen which features site-centric visuals and badge notifications.With badge notifications, site tiles come alive with up-to-date information which helps us in case there is an updated content.

The post guides the website developers so that they can utilize the pinned sites feature to a better effect with their users and promote their site’s brand directly in the Windows start screen.

If you are a developer you can provide your sites Favicon that IE10 uses throughout the browser to represent the site, in the address bar, on the new tab page, and on the Start screen. standard large site icon (32 x 32 pixels) is used to identify the site which is pinned using the website pinning feature on the Start Screen.IE10 will automatically extract the dominant color from the icon and will automatically use it as background color for the Start screen tile.

Windows 8 can use the polling method for updates for pinned tiles on the Start screen. This works perfectly well with the lightweight notifications like a new messages has been received from other users (email & social networking), new discounts on a shopping site, news articles etc.

Image Credits[Microsoft]

The jump list in the Windows 8 Pinned sites is as shown above ,it appears whenever the user launches the site from the Start screen, the pin button shows that there are jump lists available for this site.One can add static tasks to the site’s jump list via page markup or dynamically based on user interactions,using the jump list users can navigate through the sites various links.

There’s been a lot of improvement in the user interface front as well as in terms of rich features as far as Windows 8 is concerned from day one and as we inch closer to the Release Candidate we can expect some more changes to the existing features and some of the new innovative features.